


Focal Point

by plinys



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:19:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3816916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was fall, the season of wanderlust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Focal Point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PaisleyHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaisleyHearts/gifts).



> For a fic swap that I did with PaisleyHearts, using a writing prompt generator.

Connor doesn’t go back to school in the fall.

 Doesn’t think he could even if he wanted to, there’s too many ghosts there things haunting him in the corners, memories of people who were no longer there and the gazes of those he could never trust.

He can only imagine what people will say. That he burnt out of law school like he had burnt out of other things before, going too fast and then failing. An inevitable curse of a boy who never learned better and loved himself too much.

Maybe he was the shooting star, after all.

Or maybe he had just realized that there were some things more important in life than textbooks and seminars on legal practice.

More like _someone_.

If he had known they would end up like this, he’s not certain if he would have begun it.

He knows not, if he would have stood in that bar and offered to buy Oliver a drink had this conclusion been so clear before him.

But back then, he hadn’t known half the things he knew now.

Oliver had been the one good thing about the last year, and losing him wasn’t an option.

Law school could wait – indefinitely perhaps – but Oliver could not.

So they decided to run.

Connor told the school that he was going to take a year off, confessed to his sister over the phone that it might be more than a year, but knew in his heart that there would probably be no going back.

He’d left a note for his _friends_ , telling them in no uncertain terms not to bother looking for him, though admitting that he wouldn’t be hard to find. He wasn’t hiding his trail like a suspicious man that needed to look over his shoulder to check for shadows, instead he was going forward and leaving his past behind.

Oliver, had been easily convinced to go with him, smiling over a breakfast of bagels and crosswords, when Connor hold him about his intentions.

“Where do you want us to go,” had been Oliver’s only question, already including himself him Connor’s plans, without even needing to be asked.

The simple power of the word _us_ was truly profound.

He’d shrugged at the time, casual and uncaring, “anywhere but here. What about you?”

Oliver had just smiled back at him, “I want to see the world, one last time, with you.”

His words had been said gently, but they hurt like a knife.

It was wound Connor was all too willing to accept.

From there, it hadn’t taken much.

Oliver had gotten the maps and brochures from the travel store, forgoing a GPS because it made for more of an adventure this way, and laid them out on their bed.

“Pick a direction, and that’s where we’ll start.”

Oliver made the plans, calculated gas prices in different states and looked up road closures, taking his role as their navigator as seriously as he took everything else.

While Connor went and bought a new car.

The first having carried a corpse to a forest for burning, and the second having been the home of his breakdowns where he nearly gave it all up and turned himself in a thousand times.

This was his third since coming to this school, each one mysteriously _stolen,_ and this one he had hoped to fill with nothing but good memories.

His mother thinks he has bad luck with vehicles and lives in a dangerous town, but she’s only ever been half right about that.

This one won’t get stolen, because he’s driving it away from Middleton with every worldly possession that he can’t bear to part with packed into boxes in the back, and the one person that makes this all worth it sitting shotgun.

The music over the radio isn’t his usual type, instead it’s chosen by Oliver, his fingers fidgeting with the radio to find a good channel before settling into his lap when something that sounds vaguely like music comes out of the speakers.

His eyes follow the retreat of those hands, to glance at their owner.

Oliver’s in the passenger seat, his cheeks are hollower than they had been months before, he’s wearing his glasses again, and his fingers shake slightly as they brush across the folds in their map tracing out the roads that they have yet to take.

 The map well-worn now, folded and refolded too many times, pointing out the place between where they were and where they wanted to be.

There was no end in sight, no sticker on the map telling them were home was, and he quite liked it this way.

Made it seem less like running away, and more like discovering himself, discovering who he could be and who _they_ could be.

“You’re staring again,” Oliver says, his tone warm and fond, and he grins, looking at Connor out of the corner of his eye, “shouldn’t your eyes be on the road?”

They should.

That doesn’t make it any easier to look away.

Oliver has this air about him, the draws Connor back in time and time again, so that it’s nearly painful to look away.

 He’s the sun burning to bright.

The contrast to Connor’s falling star.

A year ago, Connor could never imagine that he would be like this.

Giving up law school to be with someone, to find his whole world revolving around a man with a hovering and undetermined expiration date – it would have seem too preposterous to the Connor that he had been when this all began. Time and trials may have changed him, but it was Oliver who changed him the most. Oliver who gave him something to strive for, a need to be better, because _Oliver_ deserved better.

He means to joke back, to tease like he has plenty of times before, but instead all he can manage to say is, “I love you.”

It’s not the first time he’s said those words, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Though that doesn’t make them any less true that they were the first time he said them, and it doesn’t make Oliver’s face any less red as he hears them again.

“I love you too, of course.”


End file.
